


Survival is a Talent

by conceptstage



Series: Multi-Chapter Critical Role [5]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Angst, Fluff, Human Trafficking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-11-28 15:37:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20968934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/conceptstage/pseuds/conceptstage
Summary: The Mighty Nein find a baby that was seemingly abandoned. As they begin to search for her family, they find that the truth is so, so much darker.





	1. Chapter 1

“What is it?” Beau asked, frowning down at the swaddled creature in the crook of her elbow.

Caleb stood beside her, nervously scratching his arm as he watched it squirm. “I believe, Beauregard, that that is a half-elf baby.”

“I know what it is,” she hissed.

“Then why did you as-”

“I don’t know!” The baby’s face screwed up in distress at the shouting and Beau cursed as her little lip started to wiggle. “Fuck, what do I do? What- Shh, shh, don’t cry. I’m sorry, I won’t yell.” She started bouncing quickly, rising up on the tips of her toes and then falling back down sharply. The baby had the dark purple skin of a drow and the slightly pointed little ears of a half elf. She was wearing a cloth diaper and was wrapped in a beige and red plaid blanket that was fastened closed by an elegant hair clip.

“Wait, wait, wait-” Jester said, reaching out to grab Beau’s shoulders and hold her down. “Slower, slow. Can I hold her?”

Beau practically shoved the baby into Jester’s arms. “Please.” When she was baby free, she threw up her hands and turned away to pace along the alleyway.

Jester grinned and lifted the girl up above her head. “Hello, little baby! Hello, are you having a good-” The baby burped and spit up landed with a splash right on Jester’s face. She sighed and closed her eyes to keep it from getting in and held the baby out to where she’d last seen Caleb. “Okay. I’m done now.”

Caleb hesitated but took the baby and looked back at the others who were keeping their distance. He cleared his throat and looked down into the baby’s wide brown eyes as she gummed at her own fist. He thought of the dead drow woman laying nearby, presumably the mother. “Ah. Hallo. Do you know where we can find your next of kin?” 

Beau groaned. “Oh my god…” she mumbled. “Does anyone in this fucking group know how to take care of a baby? Caduceus? You had siblings, right?”

“Older siblings. I’ve never been this close to a baby before. But I could give it my best shot.”

Beau instead looked at Fjord, who shrugged, then Jester, who was cleaning off her face and muttering angrily to herself, then to Nott. A lightbulb went off in her head. “Nott! You’re, like, a mother or something, right?”

“I’m not ‘like’ a mother or something. I  _ am _ a mother.”

Beau snatched the child from Caleb’s grip and held her towards Nott. “Here.”

Nott gave the child a critical glance. “She’s… so much bigger than Luc was at this age. I don’t know if I can hold her.”

“Don’t say that, you’re gonna give her body issues,” Beau chided. “Look, just sit down or something and we’ll put her in your lap while we go get supplies and try to figure out where she came from.”

Nott sighed but sat down on the ground with her back against the stone wall of their house. Caduceus had heard the crying from the dining room while they were all eating breakfast and had come to investigate. The woman was dead when they arrived.

“I bet that she’s from a border town,” Jester said, her voice taking on a dreamy tone. “She was out picking flowers one day when she came across an injured human man who was escaping bandits in the mountains. She took him back to her little cottage and they fell in love even though they knew they shouldn’t. The made love in the moonlight and he left to go back home to take care of his sick mother but he promised to come back for her when he could but then she discovered that she was pregnant! She came to the city for medical attention but when the nurses saw that it was a half human baby they grew violent and called the guards. She ran for her child’s life and has been in hiding ever since, but tonight she was found and chased down until she was shot dead in the back!”

“Natural causes,” Caduceus said, checking the woman’s body over. “She died from pneumonia.”

Jester pouted and crossed her arms. It wasn’t nearly as romantic.

“Is the baby sick?” Beau asked, pausing as she tried to situate her into Nott’s lap. She was more than half nott’s size, almost two feet in length.

Caduceus frowned and shook his head. “I don’t believe they had enough contact for it to transfer. This isn’t the baby’s mother. She’s been dead for two days and moved here.”

Beau frowned and stood up while Nott struggled to hold the baby’s giant head up off the ground. The baby started to cry again and wiggled violently and Fjord rushed to keep her from falling down hard.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Beau asked. “Was this staged? Someone dragged her here and dropped the baby beside her... why? What do they want?”

Caduceus frowned and looked solemnly back at the baby. “So that we would find her and take care of her. Maybe they assumed we’d think this woman was the mother. I suspect, if we investigate this woman we’ll find she had no family or anyone who would miss her body. No one who would be willing to take ‘her daughter’,” his finger quotes were clunky and odd looking. “-off our hands.”

“So this is just a convoluted way for someone to abandon their baby?”

“They wanted us specifically to find it though?” Caleb asked, moving over to check the woman for clues. “Because it is half human?”

“I suspect half human children aren’t common in these parts. The baby looks drow but it will have the metabolism closer to that of a human and will need specialized care that a drow unfamiliar with them would be unable to properly provide. We have humans in our group and the rest of us are very familiar with humans and their anatomy, they probably hoped we’d know what to do.”

“We don’t though!” Beau exclaimed. “We don’t know what to do!” She turned to look at Caleb with wide, scared eyes. “What do we do?”

“We need food,” Nott said. Beau and Caleb spun around to look at her as she gently leaned the baby back and forth. “She hasn’t been here long, she’s not cold, but it’s better to have it ready than scramble for it when the time comes.”

“We can mash up some carrots?”

Nott nodded. “We can do some vegetables. She can probably handle stuff like rice, maybe some plain, soft beans. And diapers. Not for eating, for the other end.”

Beau nodded and walked over to pick up the baby and hold her at arm's length. “Alright. Some of us should stay at the house with her and get her set up. We have some milk in the ice box but we’ll need more supplies. The rest of us will go shopping and then try to find her mom.” 

Jester turned to Fjord and found that there was some moisture gathering at the corners of his eyes. “You alright?” she asked, quietly as everyone moved out of the alley.

Fjord cleared his throat and nodded. “I-I’m fine. It’s just… they left her.”

Jester gave him a small smile and put her hand on his arm. “But now she’s with us just like you are. We’ll take care of her until she finds her family again.” She gave him a bright smile and started skipping after the others.

Fjord heard Beau call out from around the corner. “Hey Nott, how do I hold this thing!”

Jester gasped. “Don’t call her a ‘thing’, Beau! She’s a beautiful, perfect little ange- ah! Don’t give her to me! Ew, she’s got spit up all over mouth.”

Fjord sighed and started to follow.

Essek stared at the baby with a curious frown. “A half drow child,” he mumbled. “How unusual.”

Nott had volunteered to watch the baby and Fjord had drawn the short straw so they were both stuck at the house, Nott with the baby in her lap and Fjord pacing across the room. “So you have no idea who she could belong to?” They had called Essek over before Jester left because there was a dead body behind their house and they needed a grown up to deal with it.

Essek hummed. “Not a clue. You said the scene you found was staged?”

Fjord nodded, chewing on his fingernail. “Beau thinks it was someone’s convoluted way of abandoning her and throwing us off their trail.”

Essek looked thoughtful. “I am inclined to agree with her, though I would appreciate it if you did not tell her so.”

Nott nodded sagely. “Yeah, we get it, we won’t tell her.”

“What can you tell us about the woman?” Fjord asked. 

Essek frowned and crossed his arms, idly tapping his finger on the inside of his elbow as he pondered. “I did not recognize her but I have a group of guards coming over to collect her body. If she’s a few days dead, I imagine that she was stolen from a morgue. I’ll have someone go around and inquire about any morgues missing a body. My suspicion though?” He sighed. “There is no report with the guard’s office about a missing body. Either the leader of the morgue is incompetant and doesn’t realize the body is gone or she never made it to a morgue in the first place.”

Fjord frowned. “Then how did the real mother find her?”

Essek considered this for a moment. “Perhaps she merely stumbled across the body by chance. Perhaps she knew the woman somehow. Speculation at this point is useless, we do not have enough information.” He seemed about to turn to the door and leave, but paused and looked back at them. “Will you all be okay with taking care of the girl until we get this settled? I have no other people familiar enough with her needs that I could trust such a sensitive matter too. I will have someone begin working on finding her a suitable home but for now…” he trailed off, staring at the half-elf in Nott’s lap as she snored quietly.

“Of course,” Fjord said, nodding.

Essek nodded back and then continued towards the door. “I have much to do, I will contact you with my findings. Farewell.” Then he left them alone in the dining room of their house. There was a ruckus at the door. “Oh, Jester. How.. lovely to see you,” Nott heard Essek say dryly.

“Hi, Essek,” but she didn’t stop to bother him today and ran right for the dining room, squealing when she saw them sitting there. “We got things for the wittle baby!”

Caduceus followed her in with a small, tranquil smile and held up a burlap bag. “Diapers and milk.”

Jester gasped. “And I found her the cutiest little purple dress and I just really, really hope she doesn’t puke all over it right away.”

Nott sighed and held the baby out to Caduceus, who took her extremely carefully into his arms. “I’ll set up a diaper change station. Fjord, go get me one of your clean shirts that you don’t mind never seeing again.”

Fjord blinked and uncrossed his arms. “For… For what?”

“For cleaning up poop.”

Fjord winced. “What? Why my shirts?”

“Because you spent the entire time they were gone complaining right in my ear. Shirts, now.” Fjord groaned and sulked out of the room while Nott started pulling the diapers out of the bag. “Where are Caleb and Beau?”

“Sleuthing,” Caduceus said. “Beau said that they were going to see what they could find out about this dead woman and see if anyone knew about a half elf baby being born in town.” Nott frowned but let it go, instead focusing on find a clean enough surface to work with.

“We should name her,” Jester said, rocking back and forth on her feet at a safe distance from the baby's vomit hole.

Caduceus was holding her gently in the crook of his arm, bouncing her and swaying slowly back and forth like Nott had shown him before. “She’s several months old, I suspect she already has a name.”

“Yes, but we don’t know it and she can’t tell us. So maybe we can give her a temporary name, like a nickname. Something cute like… Matilda or Calla Lily or Sunshine.”

“Matilda is nice,” Nott said, laying the baby down on the table and undoing her clothes to change her diaper. 

Fjord was frowning as he walked back into the room. “Matilda? No way.”

Jester gasped at him. “What’s wrong with Matilda?”

Fjord handed his shirts over to Nott reluctantly. “It’s an old lady name. Seeing a kid with an old lady name is just… off putting.”

Jester pouted. “Well, I think Matilda is lovely. Do you have any ideas?”

“He has a silent ‘J’ in his name,” Nott interjected. “He shouldn’t have any naming rights at all.”

Fjord and Nott started to bicker and Jester blocked them out, turning to Caduceus so that she could make faces at the baby. “What do you think, Caduceus?” 

Caduceus didn’t answer right away but he looked thoughtful. “Suvi. She was left alone in a heartless, deadly world but she is a survivor. Suvi for short.”

“Oh, Suvi is perfect! I love it so much!” She grinned and let the baby grab her finger. “Hi there baby Suvi! We’re going to take such very, very good care of you until we find your family. I promise.”

Suvi just stared up at her with big, dark eyes and gave a little cough, shooting spit up down her bare chest and Jester’s hand.

“Oh, why does this keep happening!” Jester exclaimed, rushing over to the wash basin.

Nott finished laying out one of Fjord’s shirts on the table and then made grabby hands towards the baby. “Here, sit her down. Diaper change. I’ll show you all how to do it, but then we’ll take turns, alright? I’m not being saddled with this by myself. And I’m not doing any fucking blow outs, so you just need to draw straws or something.”

Fjord blinked at her incomprehensibly. “What’s a blow out?”

Nott snorted. “You’ll know it when you see it.”

Beau was getting antsy. She was sitting in the chair of the guard’s station, chewing anxiously on her cheek and tapping her foot. “Why the fuck won’t anyone talk to us,” she hissed.

Caleb sighed, tapping his fingers against his knees. “Maybe it was a bad idea for just the two humans to do this?” he suggested, watching two of the guards across the room looked at them with disdain and talk quietly with one another. “We cannot get any information if the people here are too suspicious to speak to us.”

“Goddamn it,” Beau hissed, probably a little too loudly. “Prejudice blows.”

It was perhaps the understatement of a lifetime but Caleb just shrugged in agreement. Caleb looked up when the front door opened and he sat up straight when Essek walked inside. “Ah, Essek!” he called, clearing his throat and getting swiftly to his feet.

Essek looked over at them and smiled softly. “Ah, Caleb, Beauregard. I assume that you’re here for the same reason that I am?”

Beau hopped to her feet and marched over to him, tension in every line of her body but Essek didn’t seem bothered. The guards nearby all reached for their weapons, though none of them drew yet. “We’re here to see missing persons reports from the last few weeks but these clowns keep giving us the runaround. We even flashed our badges but they won’t listen.” She snapped her head around to glare at the guard at the desk who had been telling her ‘Just five more minutes’ for the last hour and a half. “A woman is dead and there’s a baby without a family and these fuckers don’t even care cause we’re human. Fuck all of you!” Caleb put a hand on her shoulder, maybe to hold her back, maybe to calm her down, and squeezed. She growled under her breath from the effort it took to keep from yelling some more and just relaxed beside him. 

Caleb sighed and cleared his throat. “Beau is just a little high strung. She is really worried about the baby.” Beau sneered and crossed her arms but didn’t speak. “Do you think you would be able to assist us?”

Essek just smiled, seemingly unbothered by Beau’s outburst. “Of course. I'm here to ask if any of the local morgues were missing bodies, I didn’t think to check missing persons, that’s a good idea. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you, Essek,” Caleb sighed.

Beau was still fuming when they both walked back over to their chairs and Essek was lead inside a door across the room. “I’m not worried about the baby,” Beau said quietly. “I just want to get her out of our hair. We’ve got more important things to worry about.”

Caleb pat her shoulder placatingly. “Of course.”


	2. Chapter 2

They were waiting for five minutes until a guard approached them with a reluctant frown and a stack of paper. “Here,” she said, dropping the pile in Beau’s lap. It would have scattered on the floor if it wasn’t bound together with twine. 

Beau scowled as she scrambled to keep it from falling and glared at the drow’s back as she stalked away, but she turned to the papers and started untying the twine. She cut the stack in half and handed the bottom half to Caleb. “We better get started,” she said. “They’ll probably kick us out soon.”

Caleb nodded and started flipping through the papers. “Some of these are years old…” he mumbled.

“Look at them anyway. We don’t want to miss something important.” The missing persons files each had a short physical description and name at the top, and about half of them had a sketch to go along with it. They flipped through them silently for almost an hour until Beau elbowed him in the side gently. “Hey,” she said, quietly. She took a moment to look at the guards but they seemed to be purposely ignoring the humans in the room. “Look at this one.”

The name up at the top read ‘Alu’lia Rysir’, missing since 833.4.10. Eyes: Blue, Hair: White, Skin: Light, Race: Drow, Age: 140.

Caleb took it from her gently. There was no sketch attached and he couldn’t see right away why this one had stood out to her. “What about her? She has been missing for almost two years.”

She pointed to some writing near the bottom. “Last seen wearing: gray dress, blue robe, plaid scarf, black boots, silver hair pin,” she read aloud. “Plaid scarf and silver hairpin, like the one the baby was wrapped up in.”

Caleb frowned and handed it back to her. “You are right, that might be the mother. I haven’t found anything that describes our dead body yet.” He looked up when he heard Essek’s voice from across the room and met his eyes as he spoke quietly with a guard. Essek quickly finished his conversation and started making his way over to them. Caleb stood up to meet him and Beau just turned back to her stack to keep looking.

“Any luck, my friends?” Essek asked.

“We think we found the mother,” Beau said, handing him Alu’lia’s report. “The baby was wrapped in a plaid scarf and it was held closed by a hair pin.”

Essek frowned. “Oh, dear. How unfortunate.”

Caleb blinked in surprise. “Unfortunate? Why?”

Essek sighed and handed it back to Beau. “I just saw this young woman’s body in the morgue. She’s been dead since this morning. Based on my calculations… she would have perished within an hour of you discovering that baby.”

“Damn,” Beau hissed, running her fingertips down her face. “Fuck, fuck. What the fuck is going on? Two dead women, an abandoned baby… I think this is bigger than I originally thought. This wasn’t just an elaborate way to get rid of an unwanted baby, this is… weird…”

Essek nodded. “I’ll get you a copy of the second woman’s autopsy. Maybe it will reveal something.”

Caleb said a quiet ‘Danke’ as Essek walked away and then turned to look down at Beau as she continued flipping through the reports. “We should go back to the house, catch the others up on what we have found.”

Beau shook head head but didn’t look up at him. “You go. I’ll stay here and keep looking through these reports.”

Caleb hesitated. “Beau, I do not think-”

“Go,” Beau said, her voice stern. “There’s something I’m missing and I’m not going back until I figure it out.”

Caleb watched her for a moment and then sighed. He waited just long enough to bid Essek a quick ‘Farewell’ when he came back into the room and then left the station. Essek walked over to Beau and sat the autopsy on top of the pile of reports in Caleb’s abandoned chair. 

“Any ideas?” Essek asked, when Beau didn’t thank or greet him.

“Too many,” Beau answered, flipping to the next report. “And none of them good.”

Essek hummed thoughtfully. “You have good instincts, Beauregard. Trust yourself. When you look at what you’ve found so far, what is your very first thought?”

Beau sighed and looked up to finally meet his eyes. “Honestly? Human trafficking. Or, drow trafficking, I guess. Maybe the mother, if she was the mother at all, escaped her captor with her baby and had to leave her behind to save herself? But then why drag a dead body around with her? Why leave the body with the baby? None of it makes sense.”

Essek nodded. “It’s a good start. I’ll see what I can find out from my peers, maybe one of them has heard something. We will figure this out.” Then he turned to leave.

Beau frowned heavily and turned back to focus on her reading.

Nott was humming as she gently lathered soap through Suvi’s hair. They were both in the water basin, which Caduceus had filled with warm water for their bath, while Fjord and Caduceus started making dinner on the other side of the kitchen.

“Scrubby, scrubby, hot and bubbly, bath time is the best time,” she sang quietly. It wasn’t a sentiment that she agreed with most of the time, but it was a silly song that she used to sing to Luc. Suvi laughed when she sang, stopping when she stopped and then laughing again when she started back up.

Fjord came over with a single bean in his palm and presented it to Nott. “Is this soft enough?”

Nott reached out and squished it between her fingers. “A little longer. It needs to basically be so soft that it can’t retain its shape. She doesn’t have many teeth.”

Fjord nodded and walked back to the pot on the stove while Nott started washing Suvi’s arms. “Scrubby, scrubby, wet and snuggly, bath time is the best time.”

Suvi was laughing when Caleb stepped into the room. He stuffed his hands in his pockets the second he saw her and cleared his throat. “How is she doing?”

“Really good. She hasn’t cried much since we brought her inside, I think she was just cold before. She took a nap, ate some carrots, took another nap, and blew out of her diaper.”

Caleb blinked. “Blew out of-”

“You don’t wanna know, man,” Fjord interrupted. “It was orange.”

Caleb held up his hands. “I will take your word for it. Beau and I may have found the mother.”

Nott looked up at him with wide eyes. “What? Where?”

Caleb flinched. “The morgue.”

Fjord hissed out between his teeth. “Fuck,” he mumbled.

Nott was quiet for a moment and then waved Caleb over. “Here, hold Suvi so I can get out.”

Caleb hesitated but picked the sudsy baby up out of the water. “Suvi?”

“That’s what we decided to call her,” Jester said, stepping into the room with a stack of freshly washed cloth diapers in her hand. “We couldn’t keep calling her ‘The Baby’. It was Caduceus' idea, it’s short for survivor.” She giggled and bent down so that she was eye to eye with Suvi in Caleb’s hands. “Hey there clean baby. Are you ready for a clean diaper? Are you- oh god, she’s peeing on the floor.”

Caleb’s eyes widened and he looked down to see a trinkle of yellow splashing against his shoe. “Oh,  _ shiße _ ,” he hissed, holding the baby out at arms reach. “Diaper! Put a diaper on her! Catch it!”

“But these are clean! Why should I put a clean diaper on her when I’m just going to change it in five seconds when she’s done!”

Nott climbed out of the basin and started drying herself off with a towel. “She’s got a point. We’ll just clean up the floor when she’s done.”

Caleb looked up at the ceiling and bit his lip. “I hate you all,” he muttered. When Suvi was finished, Jester put her in a fresh diaper and Caleb rolled up his pants above his knees and his sleeves above his elbows to scrub the kitchen floor clean. By the time he was finished, so was dinner. Fjord stepped over him to bring the bowl of soft beans out to the dining room.

Caleb glared at his back and stood up, walking over to the freshly pumped water in the pail on the counter to wash his arms and shins. Jester handed the baby off to Caduceus who then propped her up in his lap so that Nott could spoon feed her soggy beans, and then Jester walked back into the kitchen to stand by Caleb while he washed up.

“Did Beau come back with you? I didn’t see her in our room.”

Caleb frowned. “She stayed behind to look for more clues. She is... taking this whole thing kind of hard for some reason. I expected Fjord to relate and be uncomfortable with this, since he is an orphan, but even he is reacting to it better than she is.”

Jester hummed and rocked back and forth on her heels. “It makes sense to me. Suvi was abandoned there by her only family. I can see why Beau would relate to an unwanted daughter,” she said, picking at a loose thread on her sleeve.

Caleb hadn’t thought of that, but when she said it, it made sense. “I suppose you are right. I don’t…” he paused. “I do not know what I can do to help her.”

Jester smiled. “We solve the case. Detectives don’t rest until every case is solved!” She started towards the dining room and Caleb followed her, but paused when she turned to give him a serious look. “I mean that metaphorically. I’m still going to sleep tonight.”

Caleb nodded. “I assumed.”

They all moved to sit at the table and looked up when the chime rang from the foyer down the hall. The door slammed shut and there were footsteps stomping down the hallway.

“Beau?” Fjord called. “That you?”

Another door opened and closed across the house. “The library,” Caleb said. “I will go get her.”

Caleb walked down the hallway and pushed open the library door to find Beau laying seven sheets of paper out on the floor. He closed the door behind himself and stepped closer, trying to make out the writing in the flickering torch light.

“Don’t step on that,” Beau said, waving at him.

He passed and picked up his foot, finding one of her papers stuck to his shoe. He plucked it off and turned it over. “A missing persons report? They let you take these?”

“Nope,” Beau said, without pausing what she was doing. “Took ‘em anyway.”

Caleb realized that she arranging them in order of the days they were born. “Beau-”

“They don’t care about her. They won’t do anything to help a half-human baby, you and I both know that. We’re the only ones who care about her and I’m not about to let laws get in my fucking way.”

Caleb sighed. “I know. I was just going to say that this one-” he handed her the paper that had been stuck to his foot. “- goes between those two in the timeline.”

She shifted the papers. “Thanks,” she said sincerely. When she was finished, she sighed and stood up. “I figured it out.”

“What? Really?”

She hesitated. “Sort of. I figured part of it out. Look at all these missing people, 3 men and 4 women. They’re all blue eyed, white haired, and survived by their mothers. And look-” She picked up one of the papers nearest her foot and showed it to him. 

He recognized her. “It is our dead woman,” he said. The sketch was a perfect copy of the woman that they had found out back.

“No. This woman was found dead two years ago. In Rexxentrum. And this one-” She put the first paper back in the timeline and then picked up another one with a sketch. It was nearly identical to the first sketch but the woman had a slightly wider chin. “This woman went missing yesterday, a day after the woman out back died of pneumonia.”

Caleb blinked. The pieces were coming together. “Siblings.”

“ _ Half _ siblings, they all have different mothers.” She sighed and looked down at the woman in the report in her hands. “So… how did we end up with two dead half sisters and a motherless baby? I have-” She paused. “I have a theory. But I don’t have any proof yet, I need proof or no one is gonna do shit to help these people.”

Caleb pointed to the ‘Contact’ line on the report which listed a name and address. “I think we should talk to these mothers.”

Beau nodded and started looking through the stack of half used note pads that she had stacked on the floor by her favorite chair. “I have some stuff to figure out before we do that, we can go in the morning.”

Caleb cleared his throat. “You should come to dinner first. You have not eaten all day.”

Beau hesitated. “Is that baby in there?”

“They have been calling her ‘Suvi’. And yes,” he answered.

“No,” Beau said. “I’m fine. I’ll grab some leftovers before I go to sleep.” Her shoulders were tense as she flipped open her notebook and took a seat, pulling her feet up into the chair with her.

Caleb frowned and crossed his arms anxiously. “Beau… I will admit that being around her makes me uncomfortable as well but-”

“I’m fine. I don’t have a problem with the fucking baby. I’m just focused on this right now and I don’t feel like eating.”

Caleb frowned but nodded and left the room. He made two plates of food and carried them both to the library, assuring the others that Beau was fine when they asked. Beau didn’t thank him but she ate it, writing down notes and theories and a to-do list in the notepad in her lap, working silently and picking at the plate while Caleb ate beside her.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll be adding more tags as this goes on, I haven't finished writing it yet. I'm not sure how to tag this one, but I know there's some triggering stuff in it so I'll do my very best and please feel free to let me know if you think I've missed something.


End file.
